Question

I know that I can rename my webapp (or it’s WAR file) to ROOT but this is a terrible way to do it, IMHO. Now I checked out the tomcat doc & it says

It is NOT recommended to place elements directly in the
server.xml file

So I tried doing it another method that it suggested.

Individual Context elements may be explicitly defined: In an
individual file at /META-INF/context.xml inside the application files.

So I created a /META-INF/context.xml with the following code,

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context antiJARLocking="true" path="/"/>

But after deploying when I restarted the server it still failed to load the context at “/”, it still loaded it with the "/<WEB_APP_NAME>"

Any pointers helpful.

Answer 1

What you can do is the following;

Add a file called ROOT.xml in <catalina_home>/conf/Catalina/localhost/

This ROOT.xml will override the default settings for the root context of the tomcat installation for that engine and host (Catalina and localhost).

Enter the following to the ROOT.xml file;

<Context 
  docBase="<yourApp>" 
  path="" 
  reloadable="true" 
/>

Here, <yourApp> is the name of, well, your app.. 🙂

And there you go, your application is now the default application and will show up on http://localhost:8080

However, there is one side effect; your application will be loaded twice. Once for localhost:8080 and once for localhost:8080/yourApp. To fix this you can put your application OUTSIDE <catalina_home>/webapps and use a relative or absolute path in the ROOT.xml’s docBase tag. Something like this;

<Context 
  docBase="/opt/mywebapps/<yourApp>" 
  path="" 
  reloadable="true" 
/>

And then it should be all OK!